The Courtauld is delighted to host Iris Moon for the inaugural Manton lecture, an annual lecture supported by the Manton Foundation as part of the Manton Centre for British Art in 2025.
Blue Milk: The Maternal and the Monstrous at Mary II’s Water Gallery
The porcelain and delftware collection of Mary II (1662-1794) at the Water Gallery are at the center of this talk, which explores how her taste for ceramics channeled the anxieties of queenship in early modern England. Operating beyond a strictly historical framework, the talk draws upon the themes of the 2025 exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, to propose different ways of engaging with British art history. Less invested in politics than her husband and co-ruler William III, Mary still faced the acute pressure of bearing an heir to the Stuart throne. I look at how the spectral presence of maternity loomed over acquiring, collecting, and displaying ceramics. The Water Gallery, as the only architectural site completed before her death, reveals an idiosyncratic taste, where Mary untethered exoticism from a language of absolutist conquest and harnessed it instead to a gendered and deeply personal idiom. The blue and white Delft ceramics occupied a prominent place. These encompassed stacked pyramidal floral vases with spouts in the shape of gawping monsters, ewers covered in floral patterns and writhing handles in the form of snakes. Earthenware was molded into ornate milk pans made for the dairy, a site strategically used by European queens to emphasize their fecundity, fertility, and ties to Mother Nature. Yet there was nothing typical or natural about Mary’s monstrous appetite for blue and white. My talk asks: What happens when we lean into the weirdness of Mary as having “birthed” the taste for Chinoiserie in England through her obsession with these artificial and foreign ceramic bodies? Outside of royal lineages, can we reposition her as the protagonist in a story shaped from an undisciplined, experimental yet intense methodology that reworks the past via the monstrous?
Organised by Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, The Courtauld.
With contributions from:
Iris Moon is Associate Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she recently curated the exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (2025). Her research on European decorative arts and architecture has been supported by the Decorative Arts Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Clark Art Institute.